Ah, kinda. Yes, they existed, but they frequently didn't have many of the more standard features like autocomplete (particularly on both sides of a new tag) and on-the-fly structure parsing that makes much of the painful parts easier to work with. I think we take for granted how good our modern approaches to IDE assistance can be.

Ever use the earliest IDE incarnations of Eclipse on a PC still measured in hundreds of Mhz, or when RAM was still in the dozens of MB? That was the world XML found itself in during its inception.